Post by hustleandheart on Mar 14, 2008 23:16:30 GMT -6
mavs said:
I was just out of college. I played college football for 5 years and then coached there for 2 more years until i got my masters. I came back to my hometown to work in the business world and basically leave football to going to watch games. I was sitting around the summer after i graduated and thinking i had too much time on my hands. I had 3 other friends doing the same. We all loved football, so i got a wild hair and emailed our local youth organization (that I grew up playing in) to see if they needed help. They refered us to one of the teams in the league. I called the team manager and said I was willing to do whatever and I had 3 friends ready to do the same. He told me his 7th-8th grade team didn't have any coaches and we could just take over the whole team. So as first year coaches, we took charge of this team. We started off with a stellar 0-3 record and not scoring a single point. Pretty frustrated, but we had a good group of kids. Not too much size or speed, but hard workers. We made a tweak in our offense to include some misdirection and veer option and we started rolling. We fought our way to the division championship game, 1 game from the league championship. (In our league at the time winning division games were more important). In the division championship, we went up against the powerhouse team of the league. They had us down 13-7 going into the 4th quarter. Now we are believers in conditioning (which most youth teams don't do) so i thought we would be ok. We rattled off 28 unanswered points and headed to the championship. In the league championship we kept it pretty close until a kid broke loose for a score (89 yard run) right before halftime where we let him run around for ever missing tackles left and right (some guys missed twice). We ended up losing 21-7. So our first year we were 6-3 league runner ups. I have been coaching for 6 years now and all but one of our original staff is still together. None of have kids old enough to play sports yet, so we have never had a kid on the team. We look at it as a way to give back to a league we all played in.
That is really cool Coach J, good luck next year.